Non-Mammal Mammaries

They're not breasts! They're eggsacs!

"I dunno, there's something about the combination of beaks and feathers with some distinctly, er, mammalian characteristics that just utterly squicks me out."

—The Comics Curmudgeon, in reference to the comic strip Shoe

"Blimey! Fish from space have never been so... buxom."

—The Doctor, "The Vampires of Venice"

Look closely at a female reptile, a female amphibian, a female bird, a female fish, a female insect, or most non-primate mammals. You'll doubtless notice the lack of a particular characteristic that is common to female humans.

Most animals do not have human-like breasts at all, even if they fall into the category "mammal". Artists tend to oversize the mammaries of characters that do have them or put them in places where they don't belong. Compare the bellies of a male and female dog, or even the chest of a female gorilla, and you won't find much difference unless she's recently given birth to a litter and is nursing young (that's about the only time she will ever have any vague semblance of what we call "breasts" on humans). Both the size and position of human breasts are likely the results of bipedalism—or more likely, the longer infancy-period of humans in relation to other animals (see "female gorilla," above).

Prominent breasts, or lack thereof, is one of the simplest instinctive visual cues for hominids. Giving all female animals big boobs, or at least a body shape that mimics them, allows for distinction between the sexes without adding glaringly obvious costume tags, a wasp waist, or the more bizarre gender-specific characteristics in some other animals. Another reason for large boobs on Humanoid Animals is of course Fan Service.

If the character is an alien or artificial life form, then it makes a little bit more sense. Aliens have Bizarre Alien Biology after all, and creators of synthoids and such would probably want their "children" to be anthropomorphic enough to fit in. Not to mention that it's easier to design a skin-tight rubber bodysuit with strange textures for use by human actors.

However, it tends to make a lot less sense when applied to avian and reptilian races of creatures or aliens. Breasts are for nursing young, and for an Avian with a nice hard beak (Especially those with curved or hooked beaks) that would be incredibly painful. Reptiles often have sharp teeth and often strong jaws, too, same with some fish. However, this can possibly be explainable for reptilians because their teeth don't develop during nursing, the same way humans do. Remember, breasts are for nursing young primarily—not just to look sexy.

This is common in the Furry Fandom, however, there are actually some aversions as seen in the Web Comics folder. Some furries actually prefer to just portray a reptile, avian, amphibian, or their mythical cousins (Gryphons and Dragons) without them for anatomical purposes. Granted; most if not all people know Furries can't exist in real life but prefer to draw them to draw focus away from the breasts.

Just in case male non-mammals feel left out, note that external genitalia and nipples are also a "mammal thing", and their presence in male creatures from other taxonomic groups is a variant of this trope.

There is also the school of thought of multiple breasts on aliens or furries but that's a completely different subject altogether.

See also Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism, Multi Boobage, Secondary Sexual Characteristics, Tertiary Sexual Characteristics, and Feather Fingers.

Examples of Non-Mammal Mammaries include:

Arachnids

Anime or Manga

  • Technically every Digimon with breasts ever, but special mention goes to Archnemon, a spider woman. They're not immediately noticeable, but they're there.

Comic Books

  • The original origin story for Marvel's first Spider-Woman, Jessica Drew, was that she was a hyper-evolved spider who had been genetically engineered by the High Evolutionary to look completely human (some people, apparently including Stan Lee, felt that this was going too far even for comic book science), and a well-endowed human at that. This origin story was retconned away to be that she had been bitten by an irradiated spider pretty quickly though, so this issue did not come up for long.

Western Animation

  • A spider who teaches Katy to knit in Katy Caterpillar has an impressive set of boobs.
  • Blackarachnia in Beast Wars; necessary for her Black Widow / Femme Fatale motif.

Birds

Comic Books

  • Some of the female ducks in Disney comics and DuckTales (1987).
  • In the Marvel Universe, the Shi'Ar are specifically stated to have evolved from birds (this is the reason why Deathbird, a Shi'Ar who is an apparent evolutionary throwback, has both wings and talons on her fingers). They also reproduce by laying eggs, which are incubated in a communal hatching chamber. Yet they are portrayed as basically humanoid in all other respects, including female Shi'Ar having breasts.
  • As indicated in The Comics Curmudgeon's quote at the top of this page, the comic strip Shoe is noted for giving breasts to every single female in its all-avian cast.
  • The italian comic Ava features this. To be clear the main characters are a humanoid duck and chicken, and both have not only huge breasts but also a slim waist and other stuff.

Films -- Animation

  • In Happy Feet, the penguins are barely stylized at all, but the females have shading in their chest feathers to suggest a bosom.
    • Truth is stranger than fiction. It turns out that Emperor Penguins do keep a milk-like substance stored in a gland by the esophagus. Of course, it's actually the males that do this...
    • Furthermore, several female penguins do have more expansive chests than male characters.
  • The same is true of Lani Aliikai in Surf's Up.
  • Goldie, a pheasant, in Rock-a-Doodle.
  • The Contessa, Hungarian hawk and Olympic fencer in Animalympics, has a shapely figure both above and below, accentuated by a dashing blouse and riding breeches. She also has eyeshadow and eyelashes for good measure. Other bird characters, like Babwa Warblers, are treated more naturally; Contessa happens to be the most human-like.
  • Stella the goose from Balto 3.

Films -- Live-Action

  • In the otherwise wretched film version of Howard the Duck, the eponymous avian hero at one point ogles a "Playduck" centerfold, who not only has breasts, but has nipples.
    • And only a few minutes later, we get "Duck-Tits! Woo-oo!" (Riffed starting at 1:53 in the video, NSFW...)
  • ASAIR one of animations in Super Size Me suggested that McNuggets was made from old hen breast. And by breast I do not mean the meat which is on rib cage but old-human-like breast. It Makes Sense in Context. They were explaining how originally, McNuggets were made from chickens with larger than normal breasts. So to demonstrate, they drew a chicken with pendulous breasts so big that it had to walk with a cane.

Literature

  • Like the Falleen below, the Omwati follow this trope. Among other species in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, they are apparently bird descendants that basically look like humans with feathers. This includes breasts on the women.
  • Specifically averted by James Patterson in When the Wind Blows: Max the bird girl's second most distinguishing physical feature (after her wings) is her total lack of mammaries. (She's oviparous.) Broad shoulders and the highly developed pectoral muscles needed to power her wings do give her the illusion of some breast development, even though she's barely pubescent in the first book. (The Max from the Maximum Ride young adult series is an expy of the original Max toned down to avoid Squick.)
  • China Mieville's Bas-Lag books feature a lot of xenian characters, some of which fall under this trope. His garuda are a bird-like Winged Humanoid race, female members of which possess slight ornamental breasts useless for lactation.

Tabletop Games

  • The fan-spoof Girls of Talislanta series erupted into controversy when the avian Aeriad were drawn with breasts. The controversy was eventually solved when the pose was changed so that the female Aeriad faced the other way.

Video Games

  • Wave the Swallow, per usual for post pubescent Sonic the Hedgehog cast, of the game Sonic Riders, though there is as much official art being flat-chested as official art showing budding of the chest. The in-game model tends to the former.
  • Played with in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. The Oocca have breasts (with exposed nipples), but they have multiple sets. (Also, unlike many examples on this page, they're Starfish Aliens, not Petting Zoo People—their faces are humanoid, but besides the face and the breasts, they look like chickens.)
  • This is played with in Serious Sam 3 regarding the Scythian Witch-Harpy, which appear to be humanoid women with bird wings and feet. The creature's data file indicates that its breasts are actually non-functional, and are merely a false facade (a form of evolved predatory mimicry) used to attract primate prey for the harpy to kill and eat.

Web Comics

Western Animation

  • Nazi spy pigeon Hatta Mari in the Looney Tunes short "Plane Daffy".
  • Also a red headed duck who called herself 'The Body' that was strongly attracted to Daffy Duck in the cartoon "The Super Snooper".
  • The Mighty Ducks series has three prominent examples of this, with Mallory, Tanya, and Lucretia. All of them, are female, anthropomorphic, alien ducks.
  • Daisy Duck of all characters, was given cleavage for the Quack Pack series. Of course, her character was also completely redesigned into a sassy, female reporter-type as well.
  • Regular Show has Margaret the cardinal. In her first appearance, she's showing Sideboob, and in her second (which was part of a brief dream), she has on a Seashell Bra.
  • Several original female duck characters on the cartoon DuckTales (1987). One of the stand outs being Featherika Von Strangeduck in the episode "Hotel Strangeduck."
  • The Penguins of Madagascar episode "Miss Understanding" has Skipper thinking he's a female due to a misreading of a DNA test result. During a few scenes showing how his new gender identity causes confusion during missions, the boys go for the chest bump after a successful completion but Skipper and Rico are both uncomfortable with that due to Skipper's newfound (and nonexistent) female features. Notwithstanding that they're BIRDS and don't have mammaries to begin with (or that Skipper really ISN'T a female anyway).
  • The female birds in the Disney film Valiant have much more prominent chests than the male birds, particularly the main character's obligatory love interest, a small nursing dove. The females also have a small central indention and shading in the chest that would suggest cleavage.
  • Every adult female bird in Birdz, but Miss Finch ups the ante with Hartman Hips.
    • And Morty is a rare example of "male non-mammal with nipples".
  • Gorgeous Gal from the Woody Woodpecker cartoon A Fine Feathered Frenzy. She was an overweight and elderly crow with large breasts. Although because she was overweight each breast was almost the size of the Woodpecker himself. Played as a double entendre when she appears on a TV screen from her chest up behind the Woodpecker and asks him, "How 'bout a twosome hon?"

Insects

Comic Books

Literature

  • The Khepri of Perdido Street Station, though they are more along the lines of women with scarabs for heads.
    • Fridge Logic still means this trope applies, as infant khepri probably wouldn't be able to nurse with insectile mouthparts, so their humanoid bodies' breasts have no purpose aside from Fetish Fuel.
  • The Shadows of the Apt series by Adrian Tchaikovsky has all of its' main characters as some form of insectoid; Beetle-kinden, Ant-kinden, Spider-kinden, Dragonfly-kinden, Moth-kinden, and so on. Whilst they are humanoid in appearance, they are still definitely insects by their own admission. And yet the females have breasts. Also, Adrian (briefly) studied zoology at university.
    • Actually they are all humans, the different kinden are like different races. The kinden appellation refers to the particular "totem" insect that their ancestors emulated and somehow received powers related to it.

Live-Action TV

Tabletop Games

Video Games

  • Q-Bee of Darkstalkers fame similarly has a female body with... generous proportions. But it's revealed that this is all a ploy to capture unsuspecting men for her and her hive to mate with and eat (in her victory poses, she even pulls out a knife and fork). This is most evident by the fact that, in her battle stances, she is posed with the buglike eyes on top of her head leading the body, since the ones on her face are entirely decorative (and form part of her mouth).
  • Honey B. from Banjo-Kazooie sports a pretty impressive pair, and a distinctly waspish waist. In fact, this applies pretty much any time a bee- or wasp-like character in a funny animals situation isn't a gigantic engine of stinging death instead.
    • An episode of Rescue Rangers has another such example.
  • In both Bug! and Bug Too there are examples. In the first title there's Bug's girlfriend, while the sequel sports some multiarmed amazons with large breasts in some levels.

Web Comics

  • Tammy the moth, from Kevin and Kell, sports a pretty impressive set.
  • Dreamwalk Journal is all about a world of nude anthropomorphic insects and arachnids with exaggerated sexual characteristics, including huge boobs on all the females. (They apparently use breasts for storing honey or whatever rather than actually nursing.) That's pretty much all you need to know about it.
  • In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob, Princess Voluptua's butterfly form does have a bosom. What it does is anybody's guess.
  • In response to some fan criticism, Sequential Art creator Phillip Jackson drew something creative...
  • Though the trolls from Homestuck are vaguely insectoid humanoids with a very buglike reproductive cycle, grown female trolls have been shown to have "rumble spheres". Andrew Hussie says that it's just so that readers find them easier to identify with. He also joked about the trope on his Formspring [dead link] .

Western Animation

Reptiles and Amphibians

Anime & Manga

  • This is common in One Piece, in which zoans (people who can turn into animals) usually retain several human features in their half animal form, including hair and, in females, breasts. Even in the recent case of two female characters who can turn into snakes. At least they didn't have nipples.

Card Games

  • The Orochi (snake people) in Magic: The Gathering's "Kamigawa" block.
    • A publication proclaimed the original set's Shivan Dragon to be a female because "she" had nipples. Putting aside the fact that these were probably meant to be something else and that all male mammals have nipples...

Comic Bookcs

  • Alexandra in the French comic Dungeon: The Early Years.
  • The Skrulls of the Marvel Universe are usually referred to as reptiles; they're green, anyway. Would be justified, as they are shapeshifters, if the few female skrulls shown in their "natural" form weren't as vulnerable to the Most Common Superpower as everyone else in MU. Of course, they have hair, so maybe they're repto-mammals or something else entirely.
    • Skrulls are egg-laying mammals, not reptiles. They lay eggs and then nurse their young after they hatch.
  • Nessie from Richard C Moore's Boneyard is essentially this trope incarnate; despite being a female version of Gillman from the Creature of the Black Lagoon she outsizes all the other girls by several cupsizes.
    • Not to mention this was lampshaded in an issue that took place at the beach when one of the characters Outright asks "Why does a lizard have such huge tits anyway?"
  • Tricerachops of Super Dinosaur is a half-dinosaur, half-human mutant who evidently has mammaries.

Literature

  • Averted by the Mardukans of John Ringo's Prince Roger series. Mardukans are amphibian humanoids with six limbs. (Males are also biologically female, and vice-versa, but let's not discuss that in detail. It involves "penis" ovipositors and "females" producing sperm for internal fertilization.) During a pivotal meeting with a Mardukan merchant and the merchant's wife, Roger brings his Marine friend, Nimashet with him. The Mardukan merchant is curious about human breasts, so Nimashet takes off her top to allow closer examination and even allows the merchant a few inquisitive pokes. Roger, of course, nearly chokes to death on his food.
  • The Falleen from Star Wars, although, technically, they're reptomammals. Granted, there were indeed mammal-like reptiles in prehistoric times. But designating the Falleen as such was probably an attempt to justify this trope. And anyway, if they fed their young on milk, it's very likely real synapsids did it like modern monotremes, who secrete milk from diffuse region of skin and thus don't have... "large tracts of land". The real reason is because Falleen are supposed to be appealing to a wide variety of species, and being human-created this means breasts must be on the females.
  • In Larklight, a reptile girl (who is presumably the equivalent of a teenager) is remarked upon as not having these—specifically in the context of how ridiculous it makes her look when she wears a dress not specifically tailored for her. Of course, the tail doesn't help matters there.
  • Averted in the Cordwainer Smith short story "The Dead Lady of Clown Town", where the narrative specifically mentions that the rather pretty snake-woman is completely flat-chested. Although, since the snake-woman also mentions that her people can't reproduce naturally, there's still no justification for her curvy hips.
    • Since she was genetically engineered by humans, and was not a product of evolution, she can have pretty much whatever her designers wanted her to have.
  • Jack L. Chalker's Well World series included a naga-like species with six arms and six breasts, though these were later retconned into glands for storing water.
  • There was another, very cheeky subversion in "The Race", from Turtledove's Worldwar series, where most of the characters are Humanoid Animals. The majority of the main cast were non-mammals. The hero was a reptile who noticeably failed to see the appeal of breasts—and he was the only male character who'd look the female mammal characters in the eyes while talking (think about that one). What's more, a female character was visibly Squicked when she had to have the function of mammary glands explained to her. They also found the concept of cheese to be a little weird.
  • Averted in Azure Bonds, where the heroine isn't sure of the sex of her saurial companion, due to her realization that a reptile wouldn't have breasts or wide hips for birthing.
  • Similarly averted in Guards Guards, where even Sybil Ramkin, an expert on swamp dragons, doesn't realize that the draconic "King" of Ankh-Morpork is female until the end.
  • Averted in Psychoshop, where a reptile-descended humanoid female is similar enough to make love, but has no breasts, no nipples, and no navel.
  • Amusingly averted with the draconians of Dragonlance, where male draconians have been known to lament their females' lack of noticeable feminine characteristics. "Hugging one of those girls would be just like hugging one of you guys..."
  • Averted with the Hork-Bajir from Animorphs, which are described as being generally reptilian. Also worth noting that Tobias couldn't tell Toby's gender (female) until her parents told him. (IIRC, the best way to tell is that females have two blades/horns/spikes on their heads while males have three.)
  • The Quintaglio Ascension trilogy involves somewhat anthropomorphic characters based on the smaller members of the Tyrannosaurus group. The "somewhat" part is important; while they have human-like intelligence and personalities, they're basically recognizable as the animal they are based upon and the author does not fall back on giving them human-like gender differences; females are somewhat larger and more aggressive(!) and males sport a dewlap but that's about it.
    • There's a funny bit in the third book where the heroine sees a picture of a female human and is completely baffled by her breasts.
  • Averted with the frog-like vodyanoi of the Bas-Lag Cycle, whose gender can't be identified except by voice or a peek under the loincloth.

Live-Action TV

  • The Cardassians from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine have scaly skin and prefer hot climates, which suggest they have a reptilian ancestry (although this is never made explicit), yet Cardassian women still have cleavage (sometimes). Depending on how generous you're feeling, you could almost Hand Wave this by assuming the Cardassians evolved from their world's equivalent of Synapsids.
    • Except that synapsids most likely did not, and never had, scales.
    • Whatever they are, it doesn't stop them from interbreeding with the more obviously mammalian Bajorans.
      • I go one even more specific and call them therapsids, which are much closer to being like Earthly mammals. Some therapsids did in fact have what are called "milk lines", even before they stopped laying eggs—so it's not hard to imagine that perhaps the Cardassians evolved just a little further in a mammalian direction while still retaining scales and a more reptile-like metabolism.
      • Also, Star Trek: The Next Generation established as canon that all humanoid species of the galaxy, like Humans, Vulcans, Romulans, Cardassians etc, can interbreed because they're all in some way descended from an ancient humanoid Precursor Race that seeded Earth-like planets with their own DNA millions of years ago, intermixing it with the local lifeform most likely to develop sentience.
    • Questionable example, as some mammal species on Earth have scales of a sort. Just look closely at a beaver's tail, or check out a pangolin's or armadillo's coat of armor. If that's what they evolved from, Cardassians could have come by their mix of scales and breasts (hair too) honestly.
  • The current run of Doctor Who redesign of the Silurians includes distinct breasts on the females.
  • Venus, the female turtles added to the Ninja Turtles the Next Mutation series, had nipple-less shell breasts in her plastron.
  • The Abbai in Babylon 5 are clearly amphibians, but of course still have breasts. The official tie-in guide explains it away as a structure of coiled tendrils that have a similar purpose but are not actually breasts. It's all a coincidence, apparently...

Tabletop Games

  • The Yuan-Ti in Dungeons & Dragons are snake people. It may have something to do with being able to inter-breed with humans (indeed, some supplements explain that "the yuan-ti are descended from evil human cultists who mixed their bloodlines with those of serpents," which is itself impossible); but it was probably due to... "artistic license".
    • In some editions, this is explicitly the result of magical assistance from a demon lord worshiped by the cultists, making it a case of A God Did It.
  • Dungeons & Dragons has this in 4E with the Drakkoths, which are an unusual mixture of crested lizard upper torso and the body of some sort of spiny-tailed drake in the style of a centaur. The females, despite the obvious reptilian nature of these creatures, have breasts.
    • Many fans of the game that followed the online discussions around the time of the realease of 4th Edition might remember the Internet Backdraft concerning the new Dragonborn race that was Dragonboobs!!!
    • Medusas are likewise endowed, but depending on which edition's artwork you go by this is either perfectly logical (only snaky hair) or slightly squicky (scaly and monstrous all over).
    • TV Tropes Wiki isn't the only place to wonder about this topic. There is a 58 page thread about whether the Dragonborn from Dungeons & Dragons should have breasts. Some of the confusion may be based on the fact that they are confirmed to lay eggs. A recent article makes it explicit that they are like Mammal-Like Reptiles and monotremes (see the Falleen below), and do nurse.
  • The artwork accompanying one of the Voyages of the Princess Ark CD&D articles in Dragon included a female lizardfolk shaman with substantial breasts.
  • The (presumably male) artists of the German Fantasy tabletop roleplaying game Arcane Codex like to put breasts on everything. Even on the females of reptile people. Considering that Arcane Codex has at least a dozen playable races and even more classes to choose from, with full-color artwork in scantily-clad detail, that's quite a lot of breasts. They'd probably put breasts on seahorses, if they could get away with it.
  • In Exalted the signature Casteless Lunar NPC, Madame Vert, is seen most frequently in her hybrid beast(wo)man form, a humanoid Claw Strider with the proportions of a swimsuit model such as here [dead link] ; WARNING: nipple outline may make this NSFW. While there's some sense there—her most natural shape being a human woman—it's still breasts on a scantily-clad lizard-woman.

Video Games

  • In EverQuest, there are reptile people called the Iksar; the female ones have head-frills, but no breasts. Everquest was pretty good about avoiding this trope actually.
    • Everquest 2, however, made Iksar females significantly slimmer than males, and gave them breasts, albeit breasts that could only be described as "minimalist" by MMORPG standards. Still subverted with the Frogloks and Sarnak, however. Female frogloks are a bit slimmer than males but close to indistinguishable. Female sarnak (a bipedal dragon hybrid) are much larger than males and have less elaborate facial horns.
  • Several Kremlings from the Donkey Kong Country series (particularly Klump and K. Rool) have nipples... and navels. Um...
    • Exhibit A: Kalypso. Exhibit B: Klump. o_0
      • Though reptiles don't have breasts or nipples they do have a kind of navel where the yolk sac was attached to them. Birds and monotremes (mammals that lay eggs) also have this.

https://web.archive.org/web/20111227112842/http://www.nctimes.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/article_ed5fddcd-c76c-5415-99dd-e4fbb3e7b410.html

  • The Argonians in the world of The Elder Scrolls... although this was temporarily dropped for Morrowind (unless you install certain mods). This accomplished little other than quite bluntly demonstrating the usefulness of this trope, as it was suddenly quite hard to tell male and female Argonians apart in that game.
    • Although closer examination reveals males typical have wider heads, differences in body shape and different coloring. That and females have different hair from most males.
      • This is, of course, a perfect example of why this trope exists. Take away the boobs and we can still tell the difference, if we look closely, but we lose our first, best, and most obvious identifier.
    • Other than that the females SOUND feminine.
      • Except they didn't, they (and the Khajit) all sounded like men gargling a mouthful of rocks. In fact the only noticeable difference was BETWEEN the Argonians and Khajit, and that was the choice of consonants they dragged out.
  • The Tarka in Sword of the Stars appear to be reptilian. Their females lay eggs but have clearly-defined breasts. However, the manual states that their internal structure is much more similar to primates than reptiles, making this a subversion.
  • In the Pardus browser MMO the Keldon species has breasts. Why? as the original maker of the images said, "Keldon women do have boobs. Reason: because I like them and I did the original race design, and Baldur [Game Developer] has agreed upon it."
  • The Final Boss of Drakensang, Malgorra goes in One-Winged Angel and turns into a giant, three headed serpent. However, she still retains her nipless breasts at the base of her central head.
  • As part of her Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure redesign, the plates on Cynder's underside were modified so that her upper chest has two plates side by side and are noticeably round, while the rest of the plates are flat.

Web Comics

  • Averted repeatedly with Hortense, a lizard in the Talking Animal webcomic Nip and Tuck. The only lizard in Malarkey County, she's constantly wearing bizarre wigs to try and "fit in". One example is when she throws a "slumber party" and one of the girls brings her mom's stock of lingerie—which turns out to be a "complete bust".
  • Avoided in Last Res0rt, where the obviously female Cypress (being otherwise surrounded by her father and male cousins) has no breasts to speak of, and not much in the way of hips either. In fact, the comic even correctly portrays her as the largest of the four (typically female reptiles are bigger than males). However, she does seem to go for frilly / poofy clothing that reasonably obscures this fact most of the time, and we're not even going to go into how everyone in her species has a head of hair.
  • Subverted in Wereworld, a webcomic set on a planet where "Lycanthropes" can shift between animal, human, and hybrid form. All female Lycanthropes have breasts. However, a special tribe of dragon Lycanthropes exists, and the females of the species have no breasts, no hair, no nipples, nor anything that indicates their gender when compared to the males of the species (they have mohawk-like ridges and horns that look like hair, but no actual hair—though they do have navels, strangely enough). This is spotlighted when Blaze, a female dragon lycanthrope, is chosen to make contact with the main character as a messenger of the dragon lycanthrope council. It is quite a humorous scene when Aris, another female dragon lycanthrope, tries to explain to Blaze that she looks like a male to other species, regardless of how sexy she looks to dragon males. This is fixed with the dragon lycanthropes' unique ability to transform to a semi-human form. However, Blaze misunderstands Aris's explanation of "the importance of having breasts among the other races", and gives herself far too large breasts. This led to Blaze's humorous line "If you're gonna do something, do it grand". So far, no other non-mammal lycanthropes have shown up to compare the dragon tribe to.
  • The female Nagasta (sort of merfolky-lizardy people) in Dominic Deegan have prominent breasts. When one reader asked Mookie why, his answer was "I like boobs."
  • Averted in Not Quite Daily Comic. Lulu the Turtle Girl looks like a (very creepy) child even though she's in her seventies.
  • Averted in Ozy and Millie. Isolde, a female dragon, has a perfectly flat chest. She still wears a bikini top when at the pool, however.
  • Played with in Order of the Stick, strip #676, where only one of the two reptilian hookers has breasts—they're implants, which her co-workers find ridiculous. (Given the accompanying dialogue, this is likely a reference to the dragonborn, as mentioned above.)

Oracle: Now get out, I have a hot date with this kobold chick, and my oracular powers tell me I'm getting to second base tonight.
Eugene: Wait, if she's a reptile, how do you get to second base?
Oracle: OUT!

  • Harkovast, a fantasy webcomic featuring various animal races, features a reptilian race called "Tsung Dao" whose females fit in this trope. However it is explained that in this magical setting, all races can cross breed, making the need for mammary glands a somewhat universal adaption.
  • From The Crossworlds/Accidental Centaurs universe, the N'Gae subverts this rather cleverly... at first glance, they seem to be playing this perfectly straight, until this revelation. Apparently, all N'Gae, regardless of gender, have those bulges on their chest. So whatever it is, it's probably not mammaries...
    • Although, given the author and artists' tendencies in their other fiction, it's about an even chance either way. Given that the N'Gae have hair as well and the entire world the comic is set in is peopled almost entirely by human/nonhuman mixes, it doesn't seem quite so improbable.
  • All of the female dragons from Draconia Chronicles seem to fit this trope.
  • In this panel from the webcomic Concession, Angie feels she's justified in not wearing anything above the waist because of her reptilian biology.

"What's there to reveal? I don't have breasts! I don't even have nipples!"

Web Original

  • Tales of MU averts this, with part-snake woman Celia. Considering that she has human-looking skin and even the ability to grow hair (which she considers an embarrassing condition.), this along with her eyes and fangs is one of her more obviously reptilian traits.

Western Animation

Fish and Other Sea Creatures

Anime and Manga

  • Squid Girl is supposed to be a squid, yet she at least seems from this side of the dress to have the chest—and general appearance, tentacles notwithstanding—of a female Japanese human in her early teens. (Of course, she's also an invertebrate, as stated on the DVD cover, but you'd think from looking at her that she has an internal skeleton, so...)
  • Averted in Slayers, where the female fish-people don't have breasts.
  • In One Piece Fish-People are specifically said to be mammals with fish-like traits, such as gills and scales. Thus, females have this, and do use them to nurse their children, which are born live, not hatched from eggs.

Card Games

  • Played straight by necessity by The Merrow of the Lorwyn setting, where the males and females would be indistinguishable if not for the breasts.
    • Averted by the far more feral Merrow of the Shadowmoor setting.

Comic Books

Literature

Live-Action TV

  • Averted in H₂O: Just Add Water. The show features 3 otherwise normal girls who just happen to turn into mermaids when they get wet. Their clothes disappear when they transform. As it is primarily a children's show, they are usually wearing themed bikini tops. One the occasions when we got to see what's under the top—it turns out to be a thick layer of scales, which grow over their chests, seemingly only for modesty reasons.

Music Videos

  • The fish in Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" video. Strangely enough, that's the only humanoid feature that fish has, and isn't even noticeable at first...

Video Games

  • Female Zoras in The Legend of Zelda games. Hard to miss in Ruto's official artwork.
    • Semi-averted in Twilight Princess, where both male and female Zoras are identical and flat-chested. The deceased Zora queen, on the other hand....
  • The Naiads from God of War. Poseidon apparently gussied his daughters up, presumably to make Spartans want to make out with them.
  • In Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, Hydra, giant queen of the fish-like Deep Ones, is depicted with breasts. May be somewhat Justified Trope, since it is known that Deep Ones can interbreed with humans, and therefore must presumably share some genetic material.
    • It's at least worth noting that the usual reason of making the female creature more attractive/feminine definitely doesn't apply here—imagine the Stone Age fat goddess idols, and add a few extra pairs of breasts, scales and sharp, fishy teeth. Since Hyrda is supposed to be ancestor to quite a bit of terrestrial life, it isn't entirely impossible idea.
  • Female squidlings in Splatoon - at least older ones like Callie and Marie. The whole cast are super-evolved gastropods, and many have mammalian traits.

Web Comics

  • Parodied and subverted on this page [dead link] of Campus Safari. Sure, the female shark has two curved masses, but they're gills. The site's wiki also states that males have gills in the breast area, too, but they're less prominent due to their wide chests.

Web Original

  • Parodied by the Mermaids in Tales of MU. They have breasts, of course, but are ignorant of lactation. Instead, they are used to get free beer and lure sailors to their doom.
    • Which would mean the creators confused them with the female-human-headed-bird Sirens.
      • Actually, apparently they're the same race in that universe, since one of the Mermaids has decidedly avian features in her least-human form.

Western Animation

  • Female Decapodians from Futurama are humanoid shellfish. According to Word of God, their "breasts" are actually egg sacs. Still, the ones with the biggest are considered the most desirable. Somewhat justifiable as the males would be subconsciously attracted to the females that would offer the highest chance and quantity of procreation.
    • As Decapodians die immediately after mating, leaving their fertilized eggs behind in the sea, females of their race would never get the chance to use breasts as Nature (as opposed to Fan Service) intended.
  • Short-lived series Fish Police features anthromorphic fish. Didn't help one of the main characters was a blatant pandering to dads who might be watching.
    • This also applied to the comic that the show was loosely based on.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants: Some female fish wear bras.
  • On Captain N: The Game Master in the episode I Wish I Was A Wombatman there was a short well endowed blonde haired pink octopus. She fell in love with Simon Belmont at first sight even though he wasn't interested. The cartoon ended with her chasing him so she could hug and kiss her 'dream boat.'

Non-Human Mammals

Advertising

  • A bad case of Did Not Do the Research resulting in unintentional Squick is the advert for Nestlé Cereal Bars on UK TV, using an animated character called "Uter the Cow". Uter spoke with an Arnold Schwarzenegger-style voice, and had some sort of gun-like contraption, attached to his(?) udder-area by means of a long tube, out of which he expelled what was presumably meant to be milk.

Films -- Animation

  • Averted in Kung Fu Panda, where Tigress, who happens to be Master of Kung Fu (Tiger style, of course) and one of the main characters, has no signs of feminine mammaries (as well as thin waist or lush thighs). Compared to male snow leopard Tai Lung, however, Tigress is leaner and sleeker, thus looking female and sexy without abusing cat anatomy.
    • Played straight with Commander Vachir though, who is a rhinoceros with visible nipples on his bare chest, making him one of the rare male examples.
  • In a trailer for Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Scrat the saber-toothed squirrel gets all the fur ripped off his chest, exposing two dots of nipple. Not only are there fewer nipples present than seems plausible for his species, which would presumably have large litters like other squirrels, but rodents' nipples are generally arranged in paired lines that extend forward from the groin, not on the chest as in human males.
    • And male rats and mice don't have any at all.
  • Many of the female mice in the An American Tail series have them.
  • This trope was reversed (and maybe even broken) in Barnyard and its spinoff series Back at the Barnyard, wherein most of the bovines have udders. Even the male ones.
  • Space Jam features Lola Bunny. Complete with boobs.
  • Fritz the Cat heavily abused this, featuring bared breasts in nearly every scene in a world populated only by animals.

Literature

  • In Lisanne' Norman's Sholan Alliance books, this trope is averted by the felinoid extra-terrestrials. In fact, it's stated in one book that the fact that female humans have breasts at all times makes them quite attractive to the males.
  • Similarly averted in, of all things, a Star Trek novel called Uhura's Song. The plot concerns humanoid cat-people who, upon meeting Uhura, ask her where her children are since she has breasts. She explains that human females keep their breasts even when not nursing, and the cat people basically say, "Oh, interesting." At least it was mentioned.
  • Played with in the Discworld novel Feet of Clay, where with Cheery noting about how hard it is to be openly female and a dwarf, Angua (a werewolf) muses internally that at least she doesn't feel like she should be wearing three bras sometimes.
  • In one of the Myth Adventures novels, a woman is attempting to use an illusion to look like a werewolf despite never having seen one. Later on, when she meets one, the female werewolf laughs over the, "And you only had two breasts."
  • Somewhat related: the Redwall series has a unique problem. Most of the characters are mammals, but there are no non-anthropomorphic mammals (besides the horse in the original novel and it's been more or less retconned out at this point). Yet they are always eating cheese. It was eventually explained that the milk is "Greensap milk", produced from "roots and tubers". (Mm, tastes like Deus Ex Machina. But at least it avoids the potentially embarrassing problems of locating the real stuff...)
    • On one episode of the Nelvana cartoon, Matthias suffers an instance of Marshmallow Hell at the paws of Constance Badger. (Constance is the only character to have noticeable cleavage.)
    • Averted in the Official Fanfiction University of Redwall; the human-turned-mouse heroine gets up too early on her first day, dresses sleepily, and realises too late that she's automatically put on five bras, one for each, um, set, and since she now has no protruding breasts there's nothing to hold them up, so they fall off. Many jokes in the story are made about unusual animalian anatomy, as the boys who were unlucky enough to be in the bathroom when a lizard boy discovered what "hemipenes" are found out. Less horrifyingly, a weasel student spent the first day with a bald patch on his face when he forgot he no longer had to shave.
  • Averted in Animorphs with the Andalites (aliens which at least seem mammalian). Based on the cover art, Aldrea has the same sort of muscular-but-flat chest males like Ax have. (Of course, Andalites don't wear clothes, so the makers didn't really have many options, I suppose.)
  • Weird example: In the nature Mockumentary book Snouters, one species of this fictious mammal taxon always sports prominent breasts resembling those of humans ... even in males. Justified, at least in theory, because the species in question lives symbiotically with another, and trades milk for this other species' assistance in finding food. (Doesn't explain why the breasts look so much like a snippet of Playboy got photoshopped onto a fuzzy little critter, though.)
  • In Taylor Anderson's Destroyermen series, there exists a species of cat-lemur humanoids called Lemurians, fittingly enough. Lemurian females have been noted early on that proportionality with humans are very similar, specifically the breasts.
    • This leads to some comedic/awkward moments as the bulk of the humans are sex-starved males, and one of the secondary conflicts of the series.

Live-Action TV

  • In a Mad TV skit, Babe the pig is a half-human, half-pig who is on Baywatch. All of the Baywatch lifeguards are upset until he gets a bikini top which covers his multiple rows of nipples.
  • Miss Piggy.

Tabletop Games

  • This issue comes up a lot where anthropomorphic cattle are concerned. (And see also Furry Confusion.) To wit:
    • There was a rather amusing discussion on whether female minotaur PCs of the text-based RPG Grendel's Revenge had "Udder Armor" or "Breast Plates" as part of their armor set. Thankfully, One Size Fits All provided no specific answers.
    • Similarly, female Tauren in World of Warcraft have normal human breasts instead of udders, making for some really weird appearances.
      • Human-like breasts are a design advantage for humanoid mammals of any species, since they allow the mother to nurse while holding the child in their arms. It should also be noted that, proportionately, tauren females are quite petite compared to the other races.
    • Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition has no female minotaurs. Males are human-shaped, but have no nipples. They're not even, technically, mammals, but parasites, breeding true with others.
      • Minotaurs on Krynn have two sexes, even in 2nd edition. In one short piece of fiction in that setting, a human taken captive by seafaring minotaurs notes that the first mate, whom he'd initially mistaken for male, has (modest) human-like breasts beneath her leather armor.
  • In Dungeons & Dragons 3.0e, the artwork on the Monstrous Manual depicts Gynosphinxes with prominent breasts. This is on par with mythology, though.
    • The original Monster Manual portrayed Gynosphinxes this way too.
  • Rifts plays it both ways. Female Dog Boys are engineered to have humanlike busts apparently solely because it makes them more familiar and acceptable to humans... but considering the variation between canine-like and human-like physiology within the species it's totally possible some don't. Kill Hounds, which are more in the plausible deniability column, have no such niceties. The feline Battle Cats have humanlike breasts as well. Their Kill Cat cousins, the rat and bat conversions, and the Ursa Warriors are anyone's guess; very little art of them exists.
    • A female Mutant Rat in the Machinations of Doom comic has 'em.

Video Games

  • Wing Commander seems to be a little confused about this. In the "Secret Missions" add-on to the original Wing Commander, the Kilrathi priestess is shown with a multi-part bra covering three sets of human-style breasts, while the Wing Commander Academy cartoon showed the relatively few females that were seen as being flat-chested, and the intro to Wing Commander Prophecy has a wall drawing of a Kilrathi female with one pair of human-style breasts.
  • This is true of the female Khajiit lion-people in The Elder Scrolls, who have normal human breasts.
    • In Oblivion, this almost seems like laziness on the part of the developers, as all humanoid characters have the exact same male or female body model, merely retextured and with a few features added (Claws on Argonians, tails on Khajiit).
  • The fox spirits in Jade Empire have rather...pronounced...secondary sexual characteristics.
    • Considering they're a rather obvious Expy of Huli Jing, a mythological race known for using sexuality to confuse and utterly screw with humans, I'd say it's expected.
  • Juhani from Knights of the Old Republic
  • Might be one of the reasons why Krystal divides the Star FOX fans: While furries loved the character, many others hated her for various reasons. Her Stripperific clothes in Star Fox Adventures didn't help, of course. For the record, she's not the first female character in the series, but Kat only showed up in radio transmissions until Command.
    • And poor Fay and Miyu are forever lost in the void that never was Star Fox 2. Actually a pretty good game if you can find the fan-completed version floating around the 'net.
      • Amanda, Slippy Toad's love interest in Command and an amphibian, is not a mammal (duh), yet she has breasts.
  • Much of the female cast from Sonic the Hedgehog. Rouge has these by default.
    • Truth in Television: Pregnant or nursing bats develop breasts (obviously, not ones like Rouge's.)
  • Mrs. Boggy in Banjo-Tooie. One of the most blatant of the game's many very inappropriate (and thus hilarious when discovered) hidden references/images, most of which are 100% more subtle than... those. They're at least completely covered, but just look at her running animation and make your own decision as to whether you're supposed to notice or not.
  • Averted in Guild Wars 2: Charr, while they are mammals, do not posses noticeable breasts on females, much like big cats. Rather, they're a little more lithe then the males, and have fluffy tails.
    • Discussed in a blog article by the developer who oversaw the development of the female Charr, previously unseen in the first game. Early versions did play this trope straight, but the developer ultimately gave the others a choice: female Charr would either have no breasts or, as per real-life felines, six. The decision was made to avert this trope.

Web Comics

  • Averted in Freefall. The Wolf-Woman Florence is flat because she has no children. In one early strip, her bare chest is censored (even though there's really nothing to see) via multiple stripes, as appropriate for canines.
    • In the scenes where she's nude, though, when covering herself for others, an arm goes across her chest where one would find breasts on a human female. Granted, having only two arms and a tail for coverage limits how much one can cover without the help of clothes, though the covering is more of a social response from being raised among humans.
  • In the Talking Animal webcomic Nip and Tuck, most every female depicted of whatever species (apart from Hortense, see Reptiles above) is amply endowed. Thelma, Tuck's girlfriend, even goes so far as to elaborate on why possum gals don't get "Cooper's Droopers".
    • On a slightly unrelated note, possums don't hang upside down like that—not even the lighter youngsters (young or old, their tails aren't strong enough). Just sayin'.
  • Sluggy Freelance hung a lampshade on this with the "Star Trek Adventure" where they meet an amazingly pneumatic Alien who is, of course, a male of his species.
  • The Whiteboard has a rather spectacular case of this trope. The main female character certainly redefines "foxy", and the other female character is rather, erm, prominent too. The same goes for two other female characters.
  • Pretty much subverted in Digger, neither the title character nor the female hyenas show any real signs of mammaries.
  • Twokinds uses this rather extensively.
  • Averted in Roomies by Corey, a female kangaroo who commonly goes around in nothing more than a vest, and pretends to be a guy (helps that most of the other characters keep forgetting that pouches are a female thing).
    • As shown here [dead link] when she gets a temporary job as a "booth bunny"

Western Animation

Various Animals

Films -- Animation

  • One of the Spanish frogs in the movie Thumbelina had very large breasts.
    • It's an Ink Suit Actor version of Charo, who voiced the character. Are you surprised anymore?

Films -- Live-Action

Literature

  • Subverted in Piers Anthony's Chimaera's Copper; the chimera lacks breasts, despite the hero's desire for them.

New Media

  • On the subject of dinosaur-people, this was pointedly avoided in Dr. Dale Russel's "thought experiment", the Dinosauroid. He reasoned that, like a bird, the mother Dinosauroid would feed her children regurgitated food. The creature fails spectacularly on damn near every other level, but at least he averted this one trope.

Video Games

  • Averted by Chrono Trigger: Azala, leader of the Reptites, is female and non-pneumatic.
  • Averted in the Pokémon games, beginning with Diamond and Pearl, which introduce gender differences. Many fans predicted, for instance, that the more anthropomorphic species such as the Machop family would be given humanoid mammaries and maybe additional articles of clothing. But no; in fact, most of the gender differences are subtle, barely existent, or based on gender dimorphism in the Pokémon's real-life counterparts, so good on GameFreak! (OK, female Wobbuffet wear lipstick, but it's just for the comedy value.)
    • But not averted in the originals, where this is a notable characteristic of the Pokémon Nidoqueen. And the extended Nidoran family looks fairly reptilian.
    • The male/female difference was also done a bit more conventionally with the horn size, although this difference was least prominent, oddly enough, at the Nidoran level. Since Horn Drill was a TM in generation one and Nidoran female appeared to have a large enough horn to use it, this could result in the bizarre situation of a Nidorina (which has no horn at all, though she does have a really large forehead) with Horn Drill.
  • In Mario & Luigi, Bowser gets them after Cackletta takes over his unconscious body—on the outside of her shell.
  • Justified with the various anthropomorphic races featured in the MUCK game SouthernCross [dead link] . Almost all of the races are basically human, with a bad tempered Planet-God having tried to kill humanity by mutating them over and over until they died. It didn't quite work, and while a few pure human lines survive, "human" now refers to basically any anthropomorphic character not explicitly stated as Non-Human. Therefore they not only possess mammalian features that would not be at home on their apparent species, but are also reproductively compatible with other "humans" (but generally not with explicitly stated non-humans).
  • In Star Trek Online, all females use the same body model. This includes Andorians (who have some insectoid features, like a partial exoskeleton and antenna, and four genders, with the one that actually bears the young doing so in a fashion rather like marsupials) and Saurians (lizard-people, what else).

Web Comics

  • Explained away in Triquetra Cats with the Antreyui, they are descendants of humans who have been spliced with the DNA of animals, so they're not so much anthropomorphic animals but thereomorphic people, the lizard people and bird people may have reptilian and avian traits and features but they are still mammals.
  • NSFW Comix was doing a few comics with dinosaur-related puns, which he called "Dinosaurgy". In one, it shows an ostensibly female triceratops stripping with bare breasts. In the flavor text, he acknowledges that it's impossible since dinosaurs aren't mammals, and therefore, have no mammaries, to avoid a barrage of emails from anal fans.
  • Jack uses this trope, as it includes insects, birds, reptiles and even dinosaurs, all with breasts. Possibly justified, however, as all furries were created from human DNA. It's possible that the mammal/bird/etc classifications are just cosmetic. They even show a mammalian furry married to an insect "furry", with little big-eyed mammal kids with antennae. Oddly enough, they've showed such cross-breeds earlier many times in the series, without the explanation given until then.

Web Original

  • A notable aversion in the Winds of change universe, for all animals from dinosaurs to amphibians. One of the first furry fandom aversions of this work; humans in the world turned into anthropomorphic animals with superpowers when a furry universe, our own universe, and a superhero universe was merged by a Mad Scientist. Anyone who became a high-degree morph (essentially a Talking Animal) clearly lacked these telltale human traits, but so did other degree morphs. (Likewise, male reptiles, avians, dinosaurs, and avians did not have nipples either, and they did not have other visual sexual characteristics.) Maybe a low degree morph would still maintain them but a lot of them tended to be mid to high-degree morphs.
    • As babies are born looking entirely human and only become anthropomorphic animals with superpowers at approximately puberty, a small exception was added that a mother always reverted to a low-enough degree morph to allow her to nurse her child, going back to her normal level afterwards. This even applies to avians, reptiles, dinosaurs, amphibians, fishes, and others who hatch children from eggs.
  • Furry Fandom.
    • Both subverted and (more commonly) played straight. When subverted in comic shorts or web comics often lampshaded (see lizards again, above)

Western Animation

  • Subverted in Gargoyles: Disney gargoyles are an egg-laying species with breasts, but Word of God addresses this by explicitly stating that gargoyles also nurse their hatchlings. Egg-bearing mammals don't work quite this way, but gargoyles apparently do. It helps that they're part of their own biological order, called "gargates" by Greg, who describes them as "One of those animals around in the dinosaur age that gets confused with dinosaurs but isn't necessarily a dinosaur unless it is a dinosaur."
    • This justification does raise other Fridge Logic issues, in that gargoyles supposedly don't know who their biological parents are. Do hatchling gargoyles lack long-term memories until they're weaned, or do the females all lactate and nurse the clan's babies indiscriminately?
      • It's stated once or twice that the young are part of the clan and are all their sons and daughters, so this would imply shared nursing duties.

Plants, Robots, and Animate Inanimate Objects

Anime & Manga

  • Rosemon from Digimon Savers has jubblies that bounce.
  • Mahoro from Mahoromatic subverts this nicely; She's a combat android and so big boobs would only be a hindrance. However on the battlefield of love she finds herself drastically under-armed when it comes fighting for the affections of her Master, so much so that she changes her wish for Earth peace to a wish for bigger breasts as well as asking for a modification from her creators at VESPER in a letter "home." It is promptly denied to a round of applause.
  • Cosmo from Sonic X. In a climactic moment near the very end of the series, she suddenly transforms from a child to a full-grown adult, complete with breasts and child-bearing hips... in spite of the fact that no other female of her species is portrayed with these. Furthermore, the scene comes complete with gratuitous close-ups of her swelling bust and posterior, which makes the whole thing more than a little bit worrying.

Comic Books

  • T'ra Saa, despite being a sentient plant, embodies this (possibly to avoid alienating readers when she's shown to be in a relationship with a human male). She's made appearances in the Star Wars Expanded Universe series Star Wars Republic and Star Wars Legacy.
    • One possible in-universe explanation is that T'ra Saa did this deliberately so that she'd be recognised by others as female.

Fan Works

Films -- Animation

  • A botched spell from Schmendrick in the film The Last Unicorn causes a nearby tree to sprout a female face and large breasts, with which it subjected the bumbling wizard to Marshmallow Hell. Possibly justified, as perennially-dateless Schmendrick's subconscious might've affected the magic's effects, and the tree did have a couple of suggestively-placed large boles on its trunk.
  • Thankfully averted in Nine, in which 7, the only distinctly female ragdoll (The Smurfette Principle), is just as nondescript and featureless as her male counterparts. The only things that really set her apart from the others are her voice, and a couple of very subtle details such as her smaller hands.

Literature

  • The Neti from Star Wars, though they at least are shape-shifters and implied to choose such things because they want to look more humanoid, so as to fit in better in a galaxy dominated by humanoids in general in and humans in particular.
  • The Cactacae of Perdido Street Station. Justified by their being human/plant Mix-and-Match Critters, and implied to nurse their young once they've sprouted.

Live-Action TV

  • Zhaan from Farscape is a Plant Person. Who gets orgasms from solar flares, incidentally. She does avert Non-Mammalian Hair, though.
    • Zhaan may be atypical, however. Some members of her species have displayed something that certainly looks like hair (and is bright orange, to boot).
    • The show also flips this one on its head in one episode. "Female of the species" anyone?
  • Jabe, from the Doctor Who episode "The End of the World". Possible justification, as her race ("From the Forest of Cheem, we have... trees!"), may be half-human (one of the "mongrels" referred to by Lady Cassandra). The only stated fact of their evolution is that they are descendants of tropical rainforests transplanted from Earth five billion years earlier.
  • Lyekka from Lexx. (Unfortunately for Stanley Tweedle she's also "smooth round the bend".) Justified because she is a psychic predator that took that form specifically to prey on male humans.
    • Not just male humans, she also used it on females as well (although she complained that a woman who displayed no sexual attraction tasted bad, but another female who had been hitting on every main character except Stanley apparently tasted quite nice).
  • A borderline case comes from Star Trek:The Next Generation. The Borg certainly don't breastfeed, but allowed unit Seven of Nine to keep her fairly impressive set of functionless accessories. You would think the Borg would remove them as biological tissue takes energy to maintain, and thus reduces efficiency. Even less explicable are the breasts on the Borg Queen in the movie, but maybe that body was just for formal receptions. The Borg Queen only has her physical body created when she has need for it, after all.

Tabletop Games

Toys

  • Several female Transformers, including Arcee, Thunderblast, Beta, and all who are named Blackarachnia. (It should be noted that most Blackarachnias are also at least partially organic... but they're spiders.) Notably, in one episode of Transformers Cybertron you get to see Thunderblast's "breasts"... jiggle. In another episode, she has nipples. Why, Japan? Why?
    • Botanica is a twofer: a plant that turns into a robot!
  • Bionicle is essentially an aversion; the robots identify as male and female, but are physically identical. Strangely, the main race of robots were designed to be like a humanoid race - but then again, the one girl of that race that we know of doesn't seem to have much of a bust either. Complicating matters is Roodaka, another robotic character that does appear to have boobs (but for all we know the males of her race may have them, too). The out-of-universe reason for the aversion is that the figures are made from modular parts, and it's much more cost-effective to make unisex chestplate pieces.

Video Games

  • There's a large-breasted sunflower in Conker's Bad Fur Day. You need to pollinate her with the king bee to increase her bust size. Which you can then use as a trampoline.
  • Averted in, of all things, Disgaea with the Flora Beasts. While these nymph analogues certainly appear to be female, a close look will reveal that they have no breasts to speak of. The game not only uses this to trick the player, but takes it a step further by actually naming the Flora Beast in question Bridget. Then again, this is Disgaea, and given their tendencies with female characters, this may have been simply a coincidence.
    • Then again, they are demons, like Q-Bee listed above.
  • Really, just about any Robot Girl that wasn't made for Sexbot purposes. Some of the others might be justified simply by aesthetics, but sometimes there is no excuse for the robots to be Ridiculously-Human Robots, let alone Robot Girls with huge knockers.
  • Somewhat averted in Portal as even though GLaDOS has a feminine "body", there aren't actually any breasts to speak of, unless you count the Curiosity Core.
    • Most would consider this a complete aversion, since GLaDOS is only remotely human. (Her overall shape was inspired by "The Birth of Venus" flipped upside-down; though some fans find her lack of arms and awkward posture to be more reminiscent of a woman in bondage gear, or a straitjacket, uncanny resemblance seen here.) In Portal 2 she winds and lulls back and forth in a rather serpentine motion, (frighteningly fitting with the straightjacket theme), and in no incarnation does she have anything substantially resembling breasts.
  • Played with in Guild Wars 2 with the Sylvari, a race of Plant People. They are plants that mimic the human form for back-story reasons, including females with breasts, but they are not actually breasts in the mammalian sense and are non-functional in that role - they're simply plant growths that look like breasts.
  • SCORPIO in SWTOR has robo-bosoms and hips.

Western Animation

Other

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Comic Books

  • The June 1953 edition of EC Comics Weird Science featured a story called "Right on the Button" in which a man marries an alien woman who stabs him to death on their wedding night when she sees he has a navel, revealing that he is a (GASP!) mammal, born from a (GAG!) womb! But like all EC pretty girls, she has great tits! (Unlike Xylene, she never said she doesn't take care of her babies after they hatch, to there is the possibility that she feeds her young on milk. But what are the chances of that?)
  • Subverted in the Guardians of the Galaxy comics; the Alpha Centaurians have a marsupial-like pouch instead of breasts (though oddly, the females still cover the chest area with clothing).
  • Confusingly played straight and/or averted in Archie Comics Sonic the Hedgehog. Salma and Juanita, the daughters of Espio, both have hair (and, being older, Salma also has boobs). Saffron the Bee has hair as well. This could be explained by the gene bomb that mutated all life into what it is today in the comics. However, the cover of Sonic Universe #8 shows that Argyle now has distinctly different punk hair which, not only wasn't present in his initial appearance, is rare for any male character, even if they are a mammal (the only other male with distinctly different hair is Antoine the Coyote). Let's see the Xorda explain that one.
  • Platinum a.k.a. Tina a.k.a. Platina is a robot built by Dr. Magnus creator of The Metal Men. She has the body of a centerfold complete with metal mammaries. Despite this, Dr. Magnus constantly berates her for "acting like a girl" despite obviously having made her in the shape of one. Dr. Magnus has issues.
    • In retrospect, his various mental breakdowns aren't that surprising.

Films -- Animation

  • Roz from Monsters, Inc. is a garden-snail-like monster, with breasts.
  • It's unclear what the denizens of Planet 51 are but they reproduce by laying eggs so they're likely not mammals.

Films -- Live-Action

Literature

  • The Tymbrymi in the Uplift series have shape shifting qualities and as such usually don't have mammaries. If the necessity arises though features with the tactile feedback if not function of breasts can be acquired.

Live-Action TV

  • Doctor Who shows a Chimeron woman nursing her child... with a miniature power generator. Chimerons suckle on energy. So why do Chimeron women have breasts?
  • In Star Trek: Enterprise, Trip gets raped by a forehead-of-the-week and grows nipples on his wrists. The alien has normal humanoid breasts.
  • Star Trek: Voyager reviewer sfdebris pointed out the unlikelihood of Kes, an Ocampa, having breasts if her species actually existed in real life, since her species only has to mate once in a lifetime. (Ocampas get plenty of foreknowledge of when that mating will take place so there's no reason to "fool" the males into thinking that the females are always fertile, and thus no reason for females' breasts to always remain swollen.) Also, expanded universe material suggest that Ocampa give birth in multiples to keep up their populations' numbers, and yet, Ocampa only have one pair of breasts.
    • And they're exactly the same size as humans' breasts, even though Ocampa children grow to full adult size in a matter of months, so presumably would need a lot more milk for rapid growth as infants.
      • The size of a human breast has no bearing on the amount of milk it can produce. An AA cup can feed triplets. It's the lack of adequate help, and a third hand, that makes it hard, not milk generation. Presumably Ocampa have sorted out their housework and lactation support.
  • A cartoon in a long-ago issue of Playboy showed a landed flying saucer with a bevy of semi-naked, very human-looking, very voluptuous "aliens" surveying the area. Spying on them from behind a nearby tree are two human males, one saying to the other "That's nothing, wait until you see their females."

Video Games

  • In the Adventure Game Grim Fandango, every human character is a stylised skeleton. Yet the females have inexplicable bulges on their chests. Although this is consistent with the Day of The Dead figures that the artwork is based off of.
    • Furthermore, some characters have the appearance of being fat, and it is implied that two characters have somehow managed to have sexual intercourse with each other. And when these two "kiss", a smooching noise can be heard, rather than the expected clicking of teeth against teeth. The game hangs a lampshade on this when Manny sees the love interest roll a stocking down her curvaceous leg—only to reveal bare bone underneath (Manny's still uncomfortable about it). How the stocking has the bulge of a calf muscle that isn't actually there is never explained.
    • A similar effect is also seen in this comic at A Lesson Is Learned But the Damage Is Irreversible, though not with breasts.
    • Somewhat justified, however, because the characters are Calaca dolls, not real skeletons. Hence the oversized heads, the non-transparent interior, etc.
  • The MMORPG Earth Eternal either averts or subverts this, depending on whether you expect the trope to play out or not. The multitude of races, including demons, yetis, cyclopes, and robots, are different in much the same ways humans are. However, all of them, even those that look like birds or reptiles, are actually mammals created by the gods, and closer related to each other (and humans) than the species they resemble.
  • Avoided in Final Fantasy XII. The Seeqs and Bangaa are pig-like and vaguely lizard-like species, respectively. The females are simply indistinguishable from males to the Humes (humans).
    • There is one female bangaa with a voice part, so they at least sound different. And it's also fairly hard to tell the difference between male and female moogles.
    • One mark involves defeating a monster who appears exclusively to attack females (meaning you must use your female members). This was requested by a female who was attacked by the monster in question. Funny thing? She's a Seeq. You won't notice that she's a girl until the Fridge Logic kicks in.
  • In Mass Effect 2, no Earth-animal analogue has been given for the quarians, so it's hard to say whether they are an aversion or straight example of this trope, as they are always seen wearing their full-body face-concealing exosuit. They do, however, strongly resemble humans from what little that can be seen.
    • Probably averted with turian women, who would be a bird-reptile sort of analogue, if this cut dialogue can be believed.

"'Scuse me for askin', but -- you're a female, right? You got those funny bumps, like an asari."

    • Speaking of asari, they prefer mating with other species instead of their own for additional genetic diversity. So, what does an asari need to attract a, say, human to meld with? It's even discussed ingame how members of three different species consider an asari attractive. It's also not unlikely that their breasts work as, well, breasts (i.e. for nursing.)
  • There's a frankly horrifying case in Darksiders with Tiamet—a dragon/aye-aye/scorpion creature with the head of the thing from Predator . . . and outlandish breasts.
  • The Vulcans in Odin Sphere are supposed to be fiery magma elementals but even when transformed they sports jiggly boobs.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • The Draenei are blue alien space goats, about as far removed from terrestrial mammals as you'd wanna get. And yes, the females have boobies. Orcs are alien humanoids as well, and also about as far removed from terrestrial mammals as Draenei, and their females get boobies too.
    • Some earth elementals and Titan creations have breasts as well. If the later can be hand waved as being replica of their creators, they are still made of rock or metal and don't even reproduce sexually.

Web Comics

  • Grimmer Reaper subverted this in a rather amusing way. The extra-dimensional realm of "Home" is populated by demons that take the form of ogres, trolls, goblins, gremlins, and imps, as well as some rarer forms. But what is amusing is that while it at first appears to one that the Demons are all-male, it is explained that female demons are simply indistinguishable from the male demons. Females even have male voices. Demons can tell each other's gender, but human characters cannot. A recurring joke in the series is that the human characters will often assume they are talking to a male demon, only to later realize, either through conversation or by getting a better look at the demon's clothing, that they are speaking to a female demon. Another rather amusing aspect is that some Demons, though not all, tend to have trouble telling the genders of the human characters.
  • When Gabe, in Penny Arcade, gleefully remarks that an up-coming video game may feature boobs, Tycho gently admonishes him for thinking so pedestrian: "Imagine a Chik'thar hive maiden scuttling out of her mottled carapace. Her inviting, transluscent thorax heaving with ripe larvae. She retracts her guard plates, where forty alien breasts bristle with nipples... (eyes glaze over) Yes, yes, a thousand times yes..."
  • In Homestuck, troll reproduction is much closer to that of insects than humans (although they do end up looking humanoid). Nonetheless, the adult troll females that we eventually "see" do possess breasts. Author Andrew Hussie responded to this trope by saying that the readers shouldn't be so sure that they actually know what troll breasts are for.
  • Hala River from Irregular Elis is an alien with breasts.
  • Lampshaded in the Sluggy Freelance arc "Years of Yarncraft", when Zoe points this out to Torg, Torg tells Riff how to tell which of the slimeblobs are female. Yep, it's boobs.
  • Averted again in Terinu with the ferin. Being marsupials, female mammaries are hidden in their pouches and it's impossible to tell even if they're pregnant.

Western Animation

  • In the What If episode of Ben 10, "Gwen 10", some of Gwen's female versions of the aliens have busts. Including the one that's essentially made of gemstone. This is even weirder, given than Gwen herself had yet to hit puberty. (Of course, the aliens Ben transforms into also seem way past puberty.)
    • Let's not forget Green-Skinned Space Babe Xylene, who sports an impressive set. She mentions that her species hatches from eggs. OK, maybe she's a Monotreme and would nurse them afterwards. Oh, but then she says that parents of her species do not take care of their offspring at all. Really?
    • Myaxx is pretty well endowed, seeing as her species seems to be extremely Squidlike.
  • Parodied to hell and back in South Park's Heavy Metal tribute, appropriately entitled Major Boobage. Everything in the various dream sequences sports an impressive set of breasts, complete with nipples. There are ostrich-things with breasts, planets that are basically disembodied breasts, and a trio of trolls with huge breasts growing out of their shoulders. The kicker? There is exactly one human woman -- "and you never really get a good look at her boobs". Only her boobs were censored.
  • On that note, there is the Drawn Together twist ending parodying the first "Superman" movie, where Captain Hero changes history—and the evolutionary timeline—to make everyone boob-monsters that go around saying "Boob," Pokémon-style.

Males variant

Advertising

  • Jamba!'s ringtone mascot "Crazy Frog", a.k.a. "The Annoying Thing" is this. The blue frog creature sports ambiguous but noticeable genitalia that caused some controversy when he began appearing in late night ringtone ads. When he first began appearing in music videos in the United Kingdom, a prominent black bar was used to censor his groin area.

Anime & Manga

  • Doctor Slump Remake, Obotchaman, Cute Shotaro Boy robot created by Dr. Mashirito, appears to be attached with fake penis, as Arale shows it to Senbe while her body and Obotchaman's were swapped for a repairing purpose.

Films -- Animation

  • Used as a rather unfortunate gag in Delgo.

Films -- Live-Action

  • In the film version of Alien Nation, the human protagonist police detective kicks a Newcomer in the groin to no effect; later his alien partner explains that he should aim for the armpits next time. In a reverse example in the television series, an Overseer agent sent to determine the fate of their missing vessel first attacks and kills a human farmer; the man is discovered with injuries caused by repeated blows to the armpits. One can only imagine the agent's reaction at having to administer repeated blows and doing nothing beyond cracking a few ribs. Later he attacks a former Overseer who has repented and wants to just get along in human society, killing him with a single double fisted blow to the armpits.
  • Subverted in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, when Kirk gets in a fight on the prison planet and kicks an alien in what he thought were its knees, defeating it immediately, to which the shapeshifter quips, "Not every species keeps their genitals in the same place, Captain." That being said... knees?
    • Hey, that's were some spiders have them.
  • Similarly subverted in the second Men in Black movie. However, the Ballchinian's name makes it painfully obvious where his weak point is....

Literature

  • In Small Gods, a tortoise who's really the god Om is lifted into the air by a chelonicidal eagle, but persuades it to deliver it to a specific location rather than drop it on a rocky surface. Its method of persuasion involves a hard beak and a solid grip upon certain delicate pieces of anatomy... anatomy which, as a bird, the eagle wouldn't actually have. (At least, not externally where they can be grabbed.)
    • In the Annotated Pratchett File v9.0, there's a bad joke cited in the Moving Pictures section about a toad with a troublesomely yellow penis. In reality, for a toad even to have a penis would be far more troublesome than its coloration.
  • In Petty Pewter Gods, Garrett tells a nosy hustler that he controls Mr. Big's chatter by tugging on a concealed thread that's tied to the parrot's little bird balls. Justified because the only thing Garrett's really yanking is the hustler's chain.
  • In American Gods, Anansi tells a story of how he tricked a tiger into swapping its tiger's testicles for his own tiny little spider testicles.

Live-Action TV

  • In Farscape, when Chiana, in a fight with a Scarran, asks, "Hey, do Scarrans have mivonks?" and then kicks for them... then winces and hops around, having hurt her foot. It replies that they do, but they're on the inside, and obviously well-protected.

Video Games

  • A ridiculous example of this is the fanart that Giegue from MOTHER 1 often gets. His sprite in the game, while lacking features due to it being an NES game, clearly shows him not having boobs. He is referred in game as a male yet for some reason is often drawn with boobs. If that wasn't messed up enough, he is an alien. And mammaries are a trait of mammals, which are found on Earth. He does seem to have a slender, if feminine like body, but that's besides the point.
    • However, in EarthBound, the sequel, there is a person who says that Giygas might be female. That's still besides the point. He, or she, is an alien.

Web Comics

  • In Order of the Stick, a graphic insult slung at Belkar by the kobold Oracle (Lickmyorangeballshalfling) caused a debate among fans about whether doing as he'd suggested would require invasive surgery.
    • Given that Belkar already stabbed him to death, he might as well go all the way. Though an earlier strip established that Belkar has no knowledge of reptilian anatomy.
    • A later strip has a lizardfolk note the mammalian-minded wardrobe of the gladiators' prison.

Gannji: And I don't need your standard-issue loincloth, I've been walking around without pants this entire time! It's called a "genital sheath," look it up. Hey, while you're at it, look up "hemipenes," because you can suck both of my--

  • Dreamwalk Journal: as noted above in the Insects section, it's about anthropomorphic insects and arachnids. All females have big boobs, all males have big external genitalia, and everybody gets to have sex with everybody else, including two visiting human women.

Western Animation

  • In a rare male variant of the nipples side of the equation, Duck from Almost Naked Animals has nipples.
  • On American Dad, Roger is a male Grey alien. While he does not have humanoid breasts, he nevertheless goes through a cyclical mating phase where he can lactate. And accidentally impregnant humans via CPR.
    • Roger's lactation accelerates if he finishes eating something, which gives Stan and Francine the idea of stuffing Roger with food so he can keep making milk for them. This causes a hilarious scene where Roger gains a ton of weight and is hooked up to a milking machine as he keeps getting force fed food.
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